Truly Exotic is an original one act play written by me, Frank I. Swannack. The play is mainly set in the Elizabethan period, but features anachronistic conceits. It challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be civilised when confronted with difference. The following synopsis describes Truly Exotic in more detail:

Set in the twenty-first and sixteenth-century London, Truly Exotic blurs the differences between the civilised English and foreign savage. It begins with a merchant masquerade, a physician of time and space, who has a business plan connecting two different time periods. He transports a twenty-first century prostitute to the sixteenth-century as a wench for her ability to please men from all cultures. For, in the sixteenth-century, a courtier has unsuccessfully led an English army against the Irish rebels. He has returned from Ireland too early and now needs to placate Queen Elizabeth I. In a London tavern, the courtier learns from the wench about a lost map charting an island rich in gold. It is a prize he knows would please the queen and even make him king. With the intention of attending business matters at the River Thames, the courtier meets the merchant masquerade selling exotica from the New World. After the merchant has advertised his wares, the two men exchange tales of exploits in foreign lands. From the merchant, the courtier learns about Anthroposia: a mysterious island bountiful in gold that bears a striking similarity to the wench’s lost map. He realises the merchant holds the key to truly pleasing the queen, but can the courtier afford the price?

Truly Exotic is being performed at the 2016 Page to Stage Liverpool Festival, more details and ticket purchases are from this link. Book now to avoid disappointment.

Furthermore, the festival is hosting a double bill with another play influenced by the early modern period, The Chamber of Beheaded Queens (click on title for more details). Tickets available from Eventbrite.

Truly Exotic has its own Facebook Page. Check out the play’s official trailer here.

Queen Elizabeth I named her favourites after animals – the Earl of Leicester is her sweet Robin, Sir Christopher Hatton her mouton or sheep and Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford her boar (Taylor 42). She recalls the beast fables of the Medieval tradition in which animals personify human traits. For instance, the French, German and Dutch medieval poetry focus on Renard the Fox who personifies ‘human skill, intelligence, and ruthless greed’ (Oram 329). Elizabeth’s fondness for pet names is also ripe for satire.

One possible satirical attack on Queen Elizabeth’s likeness for nicknames is found in Edmund Spenser’s poetry collection Complaints (1591), which contains a long poem called Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale . The poem is believed to have been withdrawn from circulation in manuscript form as early as 1580. In the satire the Fox as a courtier is interpreted as representing Lord William Cecil Burghley, and the Ape is believed to refer to the Duke of Alençon’s envoy Jean Simier who in 1579 negotiated the prospect of marriage between the Duke and the Queen. William Oram notes that Elizabeth gave Simier ‘the pet name of “my monkey”’ (Oram 329). The Ape could even be a monstrous Simier/Alençon hybrid (329). Yet I propose in this short study that Spenser’s use of animals does not allude to specific people. Instead, he uses figurative language to challenge the concept of personification or prosopopoia as being a suitable vehicle for representing human traits that may refer to a particular person(s).

In the 2009 film, Robert E. Howard’s eponymous hero Solomon Kane, played moodily by James Purefoy, is described on the DVD case as ‘a brutally efficient 16th Century killing machine’. It is an epithet that also accurately describes Talus, the iron man made by the goddess Astraea in Book V of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 & 1596). Along with Jove’s sword Chrysaor (another gift from Astraea), Talus is designed to help Artegall dispense justice in a blood-soaked Faerie Land (an allegorical version of Elizabethan Ireland). Talus is further described as being

Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.
Who in his hand an yron flale did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould. (V.i.12, lines 6-9)

Talus’ sole purpose is to uphold justice by using his ‘yron flale’. He is an unstoppable force who will apparently spend all of eternity or ‘without end’ ridding Faerie Land of ‘falshood’. In the context of Elizabethan Ireland, the ‘truth vnfould’ may refer -Read more of this fascinating post>

Early Modern Exchanges
The official blog of Early Modern Exchanges that studies the diverse cultural, historical, economic and social exchanges between England and Europe, European countries, the Old World and the New in the period 1450-1800.